Stories for April 2006

Thursday, April 27

At 6 a.m., Ramon Salazar is readying to leave the vehicle yard of Spanky's Portable Services in Escondido. It's Monday, and Mondays are rough. "Man, I needed an hour more sleep." He yawns. He climbs ...

I was flipping through the channels at 3 a.m. one sleepless night and caught a Montel Williams episode in which ladies were throwing a Passion Party. I flipped through Girls Gone Wild commercials to midgets ...

Growing up as the daughter of an environmental health specialist, I have a deep respect for all things recyclable. It hurts me to watch people litter, and I've been known to chase down offenders and ...

Thirty Years Ago Helen Copley, lauded by Newsweek and New West for improving employee relations, has pulled in the reins a bit. Union-Tribune staffers, all 1200 of them, will be paying a dime a day ...

La Perdida by Jessica Abel. Pantheon, 2006; $19.95; 288 pages. FROM THE DUST JACKET: From the Harvey and Lulu award-winning creator of ArtBabe ( comes this riveting story of a young woman's misadventures in Mexico ...

Red Pearl Kitchen made a splash in Huntington Beach. Now it's testing the waters of San Diego, and if the nearly full houses are any indication, it's getting on swimmingly. Enter the restaurant from the ...

Twenty-five years after he opened it, George Scolari is selling his "office" on 30th Street. The new owner, Daniel Sobarnia, will shorten the Scolari's Office name to the Office. Sobarnia did not comment about his ...

Jeff Moore and the Witchdoctors recently ended their seven-year-long Thursday-night residency at Cardiff's Kraken. On April 13, Moore and club owner Doug Aldred had a disagreement. According to one attendee, "[Aldred] approached the stage and ...

A couple years ago, New York billionaire Bob Sillerman paid $114 million for an 85 percent stake in Elvis Presley Enterprises. Recently, in advance of a planned Elvis Presley Las Vegas cabaret act, Sillerman is ...

"Welcome to the 15th Annual Good Friday 'Walk with the Suffering,'" said Rosemary Johnston from the flatbed of the truck parked in front of the County Health Building on Pacific Highway. "We're going to be ...

Jerry Sanders, the ex-police chief who became mayor, is already playing good cop/bad cop. He's the good cop, presenting a "feel good" budget that doesn't hurt anybody or anybody's pocketbook but is based on a ...

The timing couldn't be better, at least from the standpoint of termed-out San Diego assemblyman Juan Vargas, who's trying to unseat congressional incumbent Bob Filner in June's 51st District primary election. At the same moment ...

The National Republican Congressional Committee has launched a barrage of negative TV spots against 50th Congressional District Democratic candidate Francine Busby in order to soften her up for June's runoff against ex-GOP congressman Brian Bilbray. ...

By far the best-traveled member of San Diego County's congressional delegation is Darrell Issa, who ranks 24th among all House members on a list of taxpayer-paid travel compiled on Washington's PoliticalMoneyLine website. Since 2001, multimillionaire ...

Thursday, April 20

"Well, you know, I, okay, let me see," Charles McPherson sounded more spirited than stumped. I'd just asked a saxophone legend — Charles McPherson! — what originally attracted him to the saxophone. That was like ...

Boldly rising above the apple orchards of Julian, Volcan Mountain's oak- and pine-dotted slopes are swept by some of the freshest breezes found anywhere in San Diego County. Soughing through the trees like waves spending ...

Heymatt: Here's a question I've considered since high school, have done considerable research on, have asked law enforcement about, and have received many answers to. Is it legal to possess and/or sell balloons full of ...

There's a nickel-and-dime titty club on 36th and University called the Minx. I live down the street from it. Whenever I have a friend over, he always remarks, "Some night we're going in there," with ...

Elliot Leib and Renee Romano have sold Trade Roots, the reggae music-and-culture store they founded 20 years ago. "We're in our 50s" is the reason Romano gives when asked about the sale. Leib says, "Music ...

Before Jewel and blink-182, San Diego's most successful recording artist of the '90s was six-member reggae band Big Mountain. In 1994, the band's remake of Peter Frampton's "Baby I Love Your Way" made it to ...

"A good percentage of the musicians who got involved had all taught themselves to read [music] in a day or two," bassist Tara Barnes says. She and another San Diego musician, Wilson Drozdowski, were among ...

The day after Unset played their first show in March (at Brick By Brick), the band was notified by Verizon Wireless that they'd been selected as a finalist in the corporation's "Calling All Bands" contest. ...

"He partied himself into the hospital," says Pistolita drummer Cory Stier of bassist Alex Kuhse. "After our show at the Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis, Alex headed to the bar and proceeded to use ...

"Crudo" seems a risky name for a restaurant, just begging for nasty puns. But in Italian, it merely means "raw" and refers specifically to the Italian version of sashimi enjoyed in Venice for snacks and ...

Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man by Jim Cummins and David Lehman; Illustrated by Archie Rand. Soft Skull Press, 2006; $14.95; 143 pages Jim Cummins and I were talking one afternoon about the sestina ...

"I am so excited," said Pastor Jack Forness as he opened the Maundy Thursday service at East Valley Christian Fellowship. "We get to start to minister on this Easter weekend and be excited about what ...

Flexing its muscles, working in secret, and stifling dissent, San Diego in the early to mid-1990s tried to assert water independence. It got hosed. The San Diego County Water Authority wound up paying 50 percent ...

Play armchair district attorney a moment. Before you lies the case of 26-year-old William "Bill" Dolan. On February 12, 2005, Dolan goes out barhopping with some friends and acquaintances. The group numbers about eight. After ...

High flyers Top members of the San Diego airport authority's board have been traveling in style. Example number one: when Bill Lynch, Joe Craver, and Xema Jacobson went back to Washington this February in a ...

From: Loser, posted to M.A. Comments board: you guys have no information on how water finds its own level PLEASE GET SOME IT'S FOR MY SCIENCE EXPERIMENT Googling has now officially replaced thinking. A student ...

Bali Thai Café just celebrated its first anniversary. That makes it an exception to the very short shelf life of most Indonesian restaurants in California, which typically open with bare-bones budgets and go under before ...

Thursday, April 13

It's a beautiful Monday morning in mid-August, somewhere in the dusty hills of East County. Sun beams through the window of this small building, glinting off a smooth metal object cradled in Conrad Grayson's outstretched ...

'For Iraqis who have been suffering inside Iraq and those who have been violently uprooted, the word 'today' begins in 1963 with the fascist military coup that brought the Baath Party, in which Saddam Hussein ...

Often dry or merely trickling, Ortega Falls can come to life for days or for weeks following any significant winter storm. During the unusually wet years of 1997 and 2005, when the region received double ...

"Twenty-two people played on our new CD," says Burnt singer/guitarist Danny Franco. His North Park--based punky-reggae collective rehearses and records in a former tattoo parlor on 30th Street. "The space was a bona fide shithole. ...

"After 9/11, people said, 'Hey, things are serious now.' It seemed like electronic music went into a decline after that," says Jon Bishop, one of San Diego's best-known techno DJ/recording artists. He moved here 25 ...

The "Ché" in the Ché Café's name refers to Argentine-born revolutionary Ché Guevara but also serves as an acronym for "cheap, healthy eats." But the vegan fare at UCSD's campus venue has been unavailable for ...

Daredevil Jane guitarist Matt Anderson put his former girlfriend back in the tabloids with a call to Howard Stern's radio program on March 28. His ex, original Buffy the Vampire Slayer actress Kristy Swanson, made ...

Hector Penalosa's MySpace page says he's 37, which would have made the onetime Zeros bassist around 8 when the punk pioneers released their debut single in 1977 ("Wimp"/"Don't Push Me Around"). "Yeah, I lie," Penalosa ...

To finance Rookie Card's upcoming release, the band took advantage of their April 3 Casbah gig and turned it into a fundraiser. Guitarist/vocalist Adam Gimble assembled musicians and dancers to entertain the audience. Near the ...

Thirty Years Ago In what could have passed as a dress rehearsal for this summer's Democratic national convention, some 325 voters jammed a Clairemont junior high school to pick a slate of 10 potential delegates ...

"What makes this day special?" asked Pastor Bruce Humphrey of the crowd seated beneath the octagonal dome that is the roof of Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church. The congregation answered, "This is the Sunday we ...

Deep cover Backers of moving San Diego International Airport out of Lindbergh Field insist that they are going about their business in full public view. But sources inside the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority ...

Thursday, April 6

San Diegan Mike Davis, author of eight nonfiction books and Planet of Slums, the ninth, comes on the line, voice weak from recent pneumonia. We launch in. "You were educated...?" "I went to UCLA. I ...

'There were three bizarre theories for his disappearance, beyond the possibility that he had met with a tragic accident: That he committed suicide, that he had taken off and started a new life, and that ...

A wild and scenic section of the Santa Margarita River, a part of the last undammed major watercourse in San Diego County, is open to visitation by self-propelled explorers, courtesy of the Fallbrook Public Utilities ...

At Die Princess Die's recent South by Southwest performance, vocalist Pete Chekvala threw his guitar into a wall, picked the guitar up, threw it at another wall, and then dove into his band's rhythm section. ...

Eighty-five-year-old Raúl "Socio" Crespo Villardel, founder of Mike's Bar in Tijuana, died on March 8 of natural causes. In the '60s, members of Vanilla Fudge, Love, and Spirit could be found hanging out with Carlos ...

"They had to put him into a medically induced coma, and they ended up removing half his skull," says Grandview guitarist Casey Jenkins of the skateboarding accident that nearly killed their drummer, Craig Winger. "We ...

Irradio bassist Anthony Rogers-Wright says producer Alan Parsons mixed three tracks on their upcoming album (One Sound) and invited the band to his home in Goleta, just outside of Santa Barbara. "For a guy worth ...

Thirty Years Ago San Diego's University Hospital cafeteria is similar to an army mess hall. Costumes point up rank. Nurses are all in white -- either pant suits or dresses -- while female physicians wear ...

Paper tapestries printed with the oily ink and complicated characters of Japanese calligraphy flutter in a soft breeze. A warm wind crosses the sushi restaurant and delivers to me the subtle scent of ginger, tuna, ...

'I apologize to San Francisco," said Ben Haddad when the California Coastal Commission met for its monthly meeting in the Bay Area city on December 14. "As for [city attorney Mike] Aguirre...," said Haddad, an ...

Triple bogey, redux The San Diego city property agent who blew the whistle on a pending sweetheart lease renewal for Carlton Oaks Golf Course has been fired, and the timing of the move -- sanctioned ...

When the band started at Eastlake Community Church's 11:30 a.m. upper campus service, Pastor Ben Sigman was not in the building. He was still down the hill at the church's more churchlike lower campus, finishing ...